Читать книгу Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen - Lucy Hughes-Hallett - Страница 6

HOMER’S TROY. Achilles, paragon of warriors, consents to enter the fight. Ready for battle in the armour made for him by the smith-god Hephaestus, he glitters like the sun. His teeth grind, his eyes flash fire. With a voice as plangent as a trumpet’s he calls out to his immortal horses, which no other man can master, and one of them replies. Yes, says the beast, this time the team will bring their master safely back to the Greek camp, but the day of his death already hovers near and when it comes, even were they to have the speed and power of the west wind, they would not be able to save him. ‘You are doomed to die violently, Achilles.’ Achilles’ reply is impatient: ‘Don’t waste your breath, I know, well I know.’ With a terrifying yell he sends his chariot hurtling into the front line.

Of all the warriors who fight at Troy Achilles is the only one who is bound to die there. He is not courting risk: he is confronting certainty, and he himself must take responsibility for his own end. His mother, the goddess Thetis, has told him of the two destinies between which he must choose. He can stay peaceably in his father’s house, and if he does so his life will be long and fruitful. He can marry and have children. He can use his wealth and amass more. He can exploit his strength and exercise his intellect. He can inherit and rule his father’s kingdom, enjoying the satisfactions of power and, in due time, the respect accorded to an elder. Or he can fight. If he chooses the latter he will be killed before the war’s end, but first he will win such glory that his name will live in song for ever more.

He chooses death, buying immortality at the cost of his life. And so he becomes the paradigmatic hero, one whose traits and actions are echoed, with infinite variations, in the life stories of subsequent heroes both legendary and actual. His beauty, his swiftness and ferocity, his unrivalled talent for killing his fellow men, his uncompromising commitment both to honesty and to honour, and, above all, the pathos of his freely accepted death, all combine to invest him with an ineffable glamour.

His choice is not easy. There is an alternative. There is another Homeric epic and another hero, Odysseus, who chooses life, and who is so determined to hang on to all that Achilles has renounced that he will lie, cheat, and steal for it. Odysseus is an intriguer, a shape-shifter, a warrior like Achilles but one noted primarily not for his actions but for his words. Achilles’ foil, he repeatedly calls into question the values Achilles represents both tacitly, by his very existence as one who has taken the opposite path, and explicitly on the several occasions when the two confront each other. In the stories of the heroes who come after them the characteristics of Odysseus and Achilles combine and alternate, but for Achilles himself there can be no half-measures, no partial sacrifice. His choice is absolute and tragic. The brilliance with which his prowess and his physical splendour invest him is simultaneously shadowed and intensified by his inconsolable grief at the prospect of his own end, by his pity for his father and mother in the anguish his death must bring them, and by his mourning for all that he might have been. Throughout the Iliad Homer imagines him questioning the bargain he has made (and which he can at any moment revoke – three days’ sailing would take him home), asking at each setback ‘Was it for this?’ that he decided to forgo so much. He neither despises life nor belittles death. The former he knows to be worth more than all the wealth in the world. The prospect of the latter is dreadful to him. He describes the underworld habitations of the dead as ‘dank mouldering horrors/That fill the deathless gods themselves with loathing’, and he dwells obsessively on the ignominies to which dead flesh is subject.

If Achilles ever lived (something unlikely ever to be proven) he inhabited a culture separated from us by over three millennia, by tremendous changes in belief, in accepted morality, in technology, in human knowledge. Yet his story, as told by Homer, addresses questions as troubling now as they were when Agamemnon’s host laid siege to Troy. ‘Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men’, so a Trojan warrior tells a Greek, as they prepare to fight to the death. The Greek has asked to know his antagonist’s identity. The Trojan’s point is that the question is otiose. If each individual is as expendable and replaceable as this year’s leaves, it scarcely matters who anyone might be. Before the fact of mortality any achievement seems futile, any quarrel petty. Death would make nihilists of us all, were it not for the passion with which humans struggle against its reductive, equalizing influence. Achilles will give anything, including life itself, to assert his own uniqueness, to endow his particular life with significance, and to escape oblivion.

A non-Homeric legend tells how Achilles’ divine mother sought to make her baby invulnerable by dipping him in the waters of the Styx, the river over which the souls of the dead were ferried to the Underworld. The attempt was unsuccessful. The heel by which Thetis held Achilles remained dry, and it was in that heel that he eventually received his fatal wound. Thetis could not keep her son alive, but he was to find his own way to life eternal, a way closely analogous to the one she tried. Just as she had sought to save him from dying by immersing him in the waters of death’s river, so he cheated death by embracing it, voluntarily dying in his quest for everlasting life.

The Iliad begins with a quarrel over a girl. By the consent of the full Greek army, two female prisoners have been awarded, one to Agamemnon, king and commander-in-chief, and one to the supreme warrior Achilles, as part of the prize due to each for their exploits in the war. The girl given to Agamemnon is the daughter of a priest of Apollo. The angry god retaliates by sending down a plague. An assembly is called. Reluctantly, Agamemnon agrees to return the girl to her father, but demands compensation. If he cannot keep his own prize he will take someone else’s. Achilles, who is not only the paragon of warriors but also the scrupulous guardian of the warriors’ code of honour, protests that to do so would be disgraceful. Agamemnon is defiant. He is the overlord and will have his way regardless of another’s opinion: ‘Let that man I go visit choke with rage.’ Achilles, beside himself, declares that he will sail for home if Agamemnon perpetrates such an outrage against the code of conduct they all observe. Agamemnon rounds on him and declares his intention of taking Achilles’ own prize, the girl Briseis. For a moment Achilles is ready to kill him, but he is restrained by the voice of wisdom, Pallas Athena. Instead, he swears a great oath that he will not fight again in the quarrels of the house of Atreus. Leaving the assembly he withdraws to his tent at the end of the Greek lines, and there he stays. The rage of Achilles, the passion that is at once so disastrous and so magnificent, and which has earned his immortality, is not the savage blood-thirst that drives him on the battlefield, but the principled fury that keeps him off it.

This argument is far more than a squabble over possession of a slave. It is a dispute over the nature of superiority. Agamemnon tells Achilles he will take his girl ‘so you can learn just how much greater I am than you’. But is a man’s worth dependent on his rank, or on his talent? Is it a function of his social and political relationships, or can an individual possess a value independent of his place in the community? Is Agamemnon, as old Nestor says, the more to be honoured ‘because he rules more men’? Or might Achilles, whose claim to supremacy lies entirely in himself, in his own particular, unsurpassed brilliance, be the greater man? These questions are fundamental. Their answers must affect the conduct both of individuals and of states, determining the relationship between political institutions and the people of whom they are constituted.

Achilles is an exceptional being. The son of a goddess and repeatedly described by Homer as being himself ‘godlike’, he is innately superior to his fellows. His beauty, his size, and his speed are all prodigious. He is a divinely created aristocrat, a living demonstration that men are not born equal. Pindar, the fifth-century poet who was classical Athens’ most eloquent upholder of the class system, celebrated his prowess, his ‘hands like Ares’, his feet like lightning’. In the Iliad he is physically magnificent. When he loses his armour he cannot borrow more from any of his fellow Greeks, for none of them, with the possible exception of Ajax, is as tall as he. The perfection of his body is sublime, the loveliness of his features flawless. His beauty, potently erotic, marks him, like Helen, as a superhuman being. He is ‘brilliant’, literally: in armour he shines like the sun. He is faster than any of his peers and therefore more deadly in battle. When he chases Hector three times round the walls of Troy, hunting him as a hawk hunts a terrified dove, it is his speed as much as his courage and his strength that makes him invincible. Destined never to grow old, he has a young man’s splendour and a young man’s energy. His emotions are extreme, his responses passionate, his actions devastating. For all these reasons he is unique among the Homeric warriors. Nestor may be wiser, Odysseus more astute and articulate, Ajax stronger in a hand-to-hand fight; but Achilles is, by common consent, the ‘best of the Achaeans’. Only Agamemnon disputes his right to that title, and he does so on political grounds. He doesn’t claim that he is a greater individual than Achilles. He bases his challenge on the assumption that no individual can count for as much as a community, and that therefore the ruler of that community is, by definition and regardless of his or anybody’s else’s personal qualities, the greatest person in it. Extraordinary as Achilles’ gifts may be, they do not procure him especial status. Agamemnon tells him, ‘You are nothing to me!’

That would be enough to enrage Achilles, but there is more. Beyond the competition between Agamemnon the king and Achilles the hero lies the question of the legitimacy or otherwise of the war in which they are engaged. The disputed women are prizes, not booty. (They are also of course human beings whose rights, judged by modern standards, are being grossly violated – but let that be.) They have been awarded to the two men as marks of honour. They are not mere chattels to be passed from tent to tent, any more than a medal awarded for valour is only a coin on a ribbon, or an athlete’s gold cup just an expensive drinking vessel. A prize awarded to one person cannot be appropriated by another without its meaning being erased and the symbolic code within which it existed being called into question. In demanding Briseis, Agamemnon is acting, not like a warrior eager for glory, but like a bandit greedy for loot. In doing so, he shames not only himself, but the whole Greek army. In the gruesome setting of the battlefield, a situation where men are all too easily reduced to the level of beasts of prey, or to carrion, it is essential to hold fast to the elusive concept of honour as a talisman against horror and despair. Achilles came to Troy to avenge the insult done to Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus when the Trojan prince Paris abducted Helen, Menelaus’ wife – to protect their honour. But if Agamemnon seizes Briseis, then he is a rapist and an abductor, just as Paris is. The Greeks’ invasion of Priam’s kingdom is revealed to be no more than a predatory attack on a wealthy victim, and Achilles no longer a warrior in a noble cause but the underling of an unprincipled looter. If he dies he will do so ignominiously, in the prosecution of a stupid, brutal war, and the eternal fame for which he hoped will be denied him. As he later tells those who come to implore him to return to the field, there is no point in doing so once Agamemnon has robbed fighting of its meaning. The King’s rapacity has levelled all value, trivialized all achievement. In a world in which the distinction between the noble warrior and the thug has been erased, ‘The same honour waits for the coward and the brave. They both go down to death.’

When it becomes clear that the Greeks will continue to obey Agamemnon, Achilles turns his back on them, becoming, like so many subsequent heroes, a voluntary outcast from a society he despises. Self-exiled, he is isolated. His only companion is Patroclus, the beloved friend who has followed him to Troy. Always exceptional, he is now unassimilable. He respects no human jurisdiction. He defers to no one; he fears no one. In Homer’s telling of his story he is the champion of individualism against the compromising demands of the community, the defender of the loner’s purity against the complex imperfections of the group. In that role he is superb, but potentially lethal to any ordered state. When an embassy comes to him from Agamemnon, imploring him to rejoin the fighting, promising him splendid gifts and the restoration of his honour, he rejects the offer: ‘I say my honour lies in the great decree of Zeus.’ He asks nothing of his fellows now, nor does he acknowledge any claim they might make on him. In a ferociously apocalyptic vision he prays that Greeks and Trojans alike may cut each other to pieces, leaving no one alive but Patroclus and himself, so that the two of them might, alone, bring Troy’s towers toppling down. In his tent, he plays the lyre and sings to himself of ‘the famous deeds of fighting heroes’. He acknowledges allegiance now not to any living society, but only to his dead peers, each one exceptional, brilliant mavericks like himself.

While Achilles broods his fellow Greeks fight on. Slowly, inexorably, over several days, the Trojans, led by Hector, force them back across the coastal plain. Their leaders – Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus – are all wounded. They throw up a rampart of rocks and clay to protect their ships. The Trojans breach it. The two armies are fighting hand to hand on and around the ships, the beach is black with blood and the air full of the scorching heat and ferocious crackle of the firebrands when Patroclus comes weeping to Achilles, begging his friend to relent, to save the Greeks from defeat and from the horror of being marooned in a hostile land, their ships burned, to be massacred or enslaved. Achilles is moved, but he has sworn he will not join the battle unless the Trojans menace his own ships, still secure at the furthest end of the Greek lines. He will hold to his vow. He will not fight in person. But he agrees to a compromise. He will lend Patroclus his armour and send him out to battle in his stead.

A hero of the stature of Achilles has only to show himself in order to alter the course of events. Encased in the magnificent star-emblazoned, silver-studded bronze armour, which is immediately identifiable to Greek and Trojan alike as that of the terrible Achilles, with a great crest of horsehair tossing on his helmet’s crest, Patroclus leads out the Myrmidons, ‘hungry as wolves that rend and bolt raw flesh,/Hearts filled with battle-frenzy that never dies’. Seeing him, the Trojans quake, their columns waver. Achilles appears to have returned, bearing with him ‘sudden, plunging death’. Shrieking, wild as storm clouds driven by a cyclone, the Trojan army stampedes back and away from the Greek ships, back towards the safety of their own walls.

In the fighting that follows Hector kills Patroclus and strips from his corpse the armour of Achilles. When the news is brought to Achilles he lays aside his quarrel with Agamemnon. In the frenzy of his mourning all scruples about propriety, about honour, about the sanctity of vows, are forgotten. He resolves to fight the next day, but first he displays himself to his enemy. As twilight descends he climbs alone and unarmed onto the rampart before the Greek ships. Pallas Athena, whose favourite he is, crowns him with a diadem of fire that blazes from his head to the sky, and slings around him a shield of flaring storm. Furious with grief for his slaughtered friend, he lets loose three times a war cry so piercing and terrible that the Trojans whirl round in panic. ‘Twelve of their finest fighters died then and there, crushed by chariots, impaled on their own spears’, killed by the mere sight and sound of the awful Achilles.

‘The man who is incapable of working in common, or who in his self-sufficiency has no need of others, is no part of the community,’ wrote Aristotle. Such a man is ‘like an animal or a god’. Achilles, who has divorced himself from the fellowship of the army, who looks to Zeus alone for the validation of his claim to honour, has made himself independent of his fellow men. He re-enters the battle not to save his compatriots, but in pursuit of a private revenge. In the cataclysmic battle that follows he is both subhuman and superhuman, both bestial and divine. He is likened to a forest fire, to a massive ox threshing barley, to a lion (repeatedly), to the Dog Star that rains down pestilence, to the frenzied god of war. He kills and kills and kills until the earth is drenched with blood and the river that flows before the walls of Troy is choked with corpses. His rampage is outrageous, so transgressive in the extremity of its violence that earth and heaven alike are angered by it. The river rises up against the desecration of its waters: a tremendous tidal wave threatens to engulf Achilles and sweep him away. The god Hephaestus, to protect him, hurls a great fireball down from heaven. The blaze races across the plain, blasting trees and corpses and scorching the river banks until the river is all but dried. The conflict is elemental, apocalyptic, and at its centre Homer places Achilles, a figure from a nightmare, trumpet-tongued, gigantic, shrieking out his rage, his sharp-hoofed stallions trampling on corpses, sending up sprays of blood, blood on his wheels, blood on his chariot’s handrail, ‘bloody filth splattering both his invincible arms’.

In this war the Trojans are at home. At night they retire from the battlefield to well-built halls, to wives and children. They belong to a polity. Even the bravest warrior among them must defer to the civil authority, King Priam. They have temples and priests. The landscape in which they do battle with the Greeks is one they have tamed and made productive. Their horses have grazed the earth that is now slippery with blood. The spring past which Achilles chases Hector has been their washing place. Their babies wave to them as they advance through the Scaean Gates. Their parents and elders line the city walls, watching the fighting from a position of security. Hector is husband, father, son, and brother, as well as being the protector of his home and his fellow citizens. In the frenzy of battle he may become, like Achilles, as fierce as a wild beast, but he is essentially domestic. On the day of his death his wife Andromache sits weaving as she waits for him, within earshot of the fight, and her women have the water heated ready for his bath.

The Greeks, by contrast, are far from home, from family, from women, from the sources of their culture. They may have come from a civilization, but they are no longer part of it. For nine years and more they have been encamped on the windy plain with the grey sea behind them. They are cut off from parents and children, isolated from the continuum of generation. All male, all adult, only a few of them old, they form, as any army does, a pathologically unbalanced community. They are raiders, cattle rustlers: they neither grow nor produce anything. Homeless and predatory, they circle the walls of Troy like hungry wolves.

This existence, the life of a vagrant marauder, of a dangerous and perpetually endangered outsider, is what Achilles chose when he picked the path that would lead to his early and glorious death. The Trojans fight because it is their civic duty to do so, to ‘form a wall before our loving parents, wives and sons/To defend Troy’. Achilles fights because he has a lust for ‘the bloody grind of war’. Freud would recognize Hector as a devotee of Eros, the creative deity ‘whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, in one great unity, the unity of mankind’. In battle he is courageous and terrible, but his fighting is a service performed for the sake of the community. It is a function of the relationships by which he defines himself. Achilles the loner, by contrast, is an agent of Thanatos, the force that divides man from man and which drives its acolytes to seek their own and others’ deaths. He is one of the wild ones, one who has rejected the restrictions as well as the rewards of civilian life, whose readiness to risk his own death has accorded him unlimited licence. At large on the plains outside the Trojan walls he is a terrifying apparition, the personification of cruelty and brute force. But he is also, always, even when crazy-eyed and cloaked in others’ blood, dazzlingly beautiful.

Everything about him is exciting, even when (especially when) he is at his most psychotic. He is the first of the lordly delinquents, the charismatic outcasts by whom law-abiding citizens have always been fascinated as well as scared witless. Off the battlefield, arguing in the assembly or in his tent, he exhilarates by his uncompromising integrity and his emotional extremism. In the thick of the fighting he generates a related but darker response. His titanic energy, his lethal skill, his pitilessness, ring out like another, harsher, kind of truth-telling. ‘Come friend,’ he says to a Trojan prince who clasps his knees, unarmed, abjectly begging for mercy. ‘You too must die. Why moan about it so?/ … Look, you see how handsome and powerful I am? … Even for me I tell you/Death and the strong force of fate are waiting./There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon/When a man will take my life in battle too.’ This is the truth. The coolness with which Achilles faces it is connected with the deplorable but intoxicating fury with which he slaughters his fellow men.

Such courage and such rage are not human. ‘The salt grey sunless ocean gave you birth/And the towering blank rocks’, Patroclus tells him, reproaching him for his indifference to his fellows’ fate. Before their final duel Hector proposes a pact binding the winner to return the loser’s corpse to his own people for decent burial. Hector is dressed in the armour he stripped from Patroclus’ dead body, the armour of Achilles. He looks just like Achilles; he is nearly his equal in arms; he is what Achilles might be if he chose to respect the conventions governing human intercourse and rendering its useful continuance possible. Achilles answers by disowning any connection between his wild self and his civilized double. ‘Don’t talk to me of pacts. There are no binding oaths between men and lions.’ He acknowledges no obligation now to anyone or to any power other than his own rage. He is ready to shuffle off his humanity altogether, to become completely bestial. He would like to eat Hector’s flesh. He is unconstrained by any inhibition, any law. He has already consented to his own death, a decision of inhuman bravado which has emancipated him even from what Tacitus called ‘that hindrance to all mighty enterprises, the desire for survival’. Death may be immortality’s opposite, but it confers a similar invulnerability. Death-dealing and bent on dying, Achilles has achieved absolute freedom.

Panic-stricken, the Trojans flee before him, racing for the security of the city. At last only Hector is left outside the walls. The two champions confront each other. Achilles is deadly as the Dog Star, brilliant as the blazing sun. Hector, the noble, all but invincible Hector, loses his nerve and runs. Three times the great runner Achilles chases him round the walls of Troy. Hector is humiliated, pathetic, as feeble as a cringing dove. At last he turns to fight and be killed. With his last breath he foretells Achilles’ own death, but Achilles, as impervious to fear as he is to compassion, taunts him: ‘Die, die! For my own death, I’ll meet it freely.’ As soon as the Trojan is still the rest of the Greeks run up. In a scene of horrible frenzy each one of them stabs Hector’s corpse, until Achilles calls them off. He, the killer, will also be the prime desecrator of Hector’s body. He pierces the tendons in the Trojan prince’s ankles (the tendons later to be known by his own name) and lashes them to the back of his chariot. As he whips his horses to a gallop and races over the plain back to the Greek camp Hector’s head, so handsome once, is dragged bouncing in the dust behind him. From the walls of Troy the watchers, Hector’s parents among them, scream out their horror and their despair.

This agent of mass slaughter and perpetrator of atrocity, this ‘monstrous man’ as Priam justly calls him, Achilles, is still ‘the best of the Achaeans’, the supreme exemplar of heroic virtue. Back in camp, he presides at a splendid funeral games for Patroclus. As instigator of the games and giver of the prizes, he does not compete: were he to do so, he would, of course, be unbeatable. He consoles the losers, arbitrates wherever there is a dispute and sends all home happy with the generosity of his awards. His rage has left him. When Agamemnon wishes to compete as spear-thrower, risking an embarrassing situation if he loses, Achilles intervenes to prevent him by tactful flattery, acknowledging, as he once so passionately refused to do, his commander’s superiority: ‘You are the best by far.’ Even his deference is princely. He is courteous, judicious, munificent, a lord among men.

Disputes about the composition of the Iliad are legion, probably insoluble, and certainly outside the scope of this book. There is a case for considering the funeral games episode to be a later interpolation; but whether or not it always formed part of the Iliad, it certainly did so by the time Homer had come to be ‘the educator of the Greeks’. To the Athenians of the classical era Homer was not only ‘the Poet’, the supreme practitioner of the noblest art; he was also a sage whose works were imagined to contain all wisdom. The Iliad and the Odyssey were recited in their entirety to huge crowds at the great Panathenaic festivals. The citizens of Periclean Athens heard the story of Achilles the frenzied killer who, once the fighting was over, was also a gracious, fine-mannered aristocrat, and saw no inconsistency worth their puzzling over. Patroclus, the man over whom Achilles mourns so frantically, was a fighter almost as savage as his friend, and yet Homer repeatedly describes him as being ‘gentle’. In a warrior culture nobility, even gentleness, coexist comfortably with a capacity for mass-murder.

For twelve days Hector’s body lies unburied. For twelve days Achilles mourns for Patroclus, wandering distraught along the beach, or time and again lashing his enemy’s corpse to his chariot and dragging it three times around his beloved’s tomb. At last the gods intervene. Thetis comes to tell her son that it is Zeus’ will he return the body. That night, helped by Hermes, who has led him unseen past the Greek sentries, old King Priam appears in Achilles’ tent and begs to be allowed to ransom Hector’s body. He offers in exchange magnificent gifts: twelve of the brocaded robes for which the weavers of Troy are celebrated all over the known world, tripods and cauldrons, ten bars of gold, a priceless Thracian cup. Achilles, who has repeatedly spurned Agamemnon’s attempts to conciliate him with rich gifts, accepts.

On the wonderful shield Hephaestus forged for Achilles two cities are depicted, two visions juxtaposed. One is that of a world of war, where even allies quarrel over tactics, where animals and men alike are promiscuously and wastefully killed, where the only way of resolving differences is by the slaughter of opponents. The other is a microcosm of civilized life, typified first by weddings and dancing, emblems of union and cooperative creation, and, most pointedly, by the detailed representation of a dispute resolved, not by violence, but by argument culminating in financial payment. A man has been murdered. The killer and the victim’s kinsman have come into the marketplace so that the case may be publicly debated. The killer offers to pay the blood price. The other refuses to accept it. Both ask for a judge to ‘cut the knot’ of their antagonism, to save them from the horrors of vendetta. The elders of the city, in turn, propose solutions. Money, not blood, will end this quarrel.

Mercenary exchange has frequently been held to be antithetical to the heroic ideal. One who allows himself to be bought off forfeits his claim to glory. Plato censured Homer for showing the great Achilles trading a corpse for gifts. A hero should not be represented as suffering from the ‘disease of mean-spirited avarice’. Sallust, the Roman historian, praised the great men of Rome’s early days for their disdain for gold, their preference for fame: ‘To be seen of all while doing a splendid deed, this they considered riches.’ Virgil, whose hero was the Trojan prince Aeneas, cast Achilles as the archenemy, not only of Troy but of civilization in general, and took every opportunity of discrediting him: in the Aeneid the events of the Iliad are conflated so as to suggest that Achilles was driven by financial greed, that he killed Hector with the ignoble intention of selling him. The distaste for deal-making has proved persistent. At the beginning of the twentieth century members of the European nobility still thought twice before marrying their children to nouveaux riches who had made their fortunes in trade.

The heroes of the Iliad have no such scruples. In the terrifyingly belligerent world Homer describes, the making of a financial deal seems like a blessed release from the otherwise inevitable cycle of killing and counter-killing. As Ajax argues: ‘Any man will accept the blood-price paid/For a brother murdered, a child done to death.’ Once the price has been paid the murderer can be reincorporated into society and the injured man must ‘curb his pride, his smouldering, vengeful spirit’. Such transactions may run counter to the individual’s craving for vengeance but they are necessary to the preservation of the community. Far from being dishonourable, they are manifestations of praiseworthy forbearance. Achilles’ refusal to accept Agamemnon’s gifts along with his apology is a sign that he is still death-bent, an enemy of his own kind, a ‘hard, ruthless man’.

He accepts the exchange Priam proposes because the old King asks it not only for his own sake but also for that of Achilles’ father, who will some day grieve as he does now for the loss of a glorious son. Touched at last, Achilles weeps with him. The rage that had made him emotionally inviolable has passed. He feels pity, for Priam, for his own father, for Patroclus, for himself. He is no longer isolated, no longer either superhuman or subhuman, but part of a family, part of a race. He urges Priam to eat, as Odysseus and Thetis have each on earlier occasions urged him to do: the need for food being something that humbles people, reminds them of their vulnerability and of the imperative need for cooperation. He seems almost ready to countenance the compromises and sacrifices a social existence requires, to accept the limitations physicality sets to a human’s behaviour. Ever since Briseis was taken from him, he has been set on a suicidal course. ‘Only death submits to no man,’ says Agamemnon, infuriated by his obduracy; but Achilles has been as implacable as death, and implacably set on dying. Perhaps, if it were open to him to choose again, he might this time choose survival. But he is given no second chance. Priam returns to Troy with Hector’s body. For twelve days both sides observe a truce while the Trojans celebrate the funeral rites. Shortly after the fighting resumes, Achilles falls.

The Romans had a legend that in earliest times a chasm opened up in the centre of the Forum, threatening to yawn wide enough to swallow the city. The terrified citizens consulted the oracles, which told them that the horrid mouth would close only if Rome’s greatest treasure were cast into it. A splendid young man named Curtius, handsome, brave and nobly born, at once sprang upon his horse and, fully armed as though for battle, put his spurs to its sides and leapt into the abyss. The earth closed over him. The city was saved. Similarly, the death of Achilles, ‘the best of the Achaeans’, opens the way for a Hellenic victory. Once their supreme warrior, their greatest treasure, has been sacrificed, the Greeks take Troy.

When the war is over, when the fabled towers of Troy are shattered, its riches plundered and its people slaughtered or enslaved, when the Greeks at last have sailed away, Poseidon and Apollo throw down the massive rampart that protected the Greek ships. The proper sacrifices were not made before building began. The prodigious wall is an impious defacement of the landscape. The gods call upon the waters of the earth to wash it away. Rivers in flood, torrential rain, the sea’s breakers, all batter against it until there is nothing left of that desperate labour. Poseidon ‘made all smooth along the rip of the Hellespont/And piled the endless beaches deep in sand again’. This war, the most celebrated in human history, is to leave no trace upon the face of the earth.

‘You’d think me hardly sane,’ says Apollo to a fellow god, ‘if I fought with you for the sake of wretched mortals./Like leaves, no sooner flourishing, full of the sun’s fire,/Feeding on earth’s gifts, then they waste away and die.’ Human affairs, viewed sub specie aeternitatis, are of gnat-like insignificance. Human aspirations are absurd, and human lifespan as short as summer’s lease.

For Homer’s heroes there is no sublime afterlife to compensate for this one’s brevity. The souls of the dead survive, but once parted from their bodies their existence is shadowy and mournful. When a warrior dies his soul goes ‘winging down to the House of Death,/ Wailing its fate, leaving his manhood far behind,/His young and supple strength’. Physical beauty, the marvellous vigour and grace of the human body, these are life’s splendours. The pleasures of the intellect, of stratagem and story telling and debate, are prized as well, but they too are a part of corporeal life, dependent for their very existence on ear and tongue and brain. ‘In Death’s strong house,’ says Achilles, ‘there is something left/A ghost, a phantom – true, but not real breath of life.’

Achilles and his fellows treat bodies, alive or dead, with reverence and tenderness – or with a violence that deliberately outrages the body’s acknowledged sanctity. More than half of the fighting described in the Iliad consists of battles over corpses, as a warrior’s enemies try to strip his fallen body of armour (which, poignantly, is far more durable than its wearers) while his comrades struggle to defend him from such posthumous indignity, giving their lives sometimes to save one already dead. It is the flesh that is precious: without it, the spirit is of little consequence. Funerals are awesome, long-drawn-out, and prodigally expensive. Funeral games honour the dead by celebrating the survivors’ bodily strength and swiftness and skill, insisting, even in commemoration of one who has lost it, that the breath of life is of ineffable value. And once gone it is irretrievable. Achilles refuses all Agamemnon’s proffered presents, and he would refuse them even if they were as numberless as the sand; for all the world’s wealth is worth less than his little time in the sun. ‘A man’s life’s breath cannot come back again once it slips through a man’s clenched teeth.’

But just as the discarnate spirit is a sad and paltry thing, so the inanimate flesh is gross and open to the most squalid abuse. The dignity of embodied man is exquisitely precarious. ‘Oh my captains,’ cries Patroclus, grieving over the beleaguered Greeks. ‘How doomed you are … to glut with your shining fat/The wild dogs of battle here in Troy.’ The Homeric warriors, who have lived for over nine years by a battlefield, the horrors of war perpetually before their eyes, are haunted by the knowledge that the strong arms, the tireless shoulders, the springy knees in which they take such pride, are also so much grease to be melted and swallowed up by the impartial earth, so many joints of meat. In one of this harsh poem’s most desolating passages King Priam foresees his own death. ‘The dogs before my doors/Will eat me raw … The very dogs/I bred in my own halls to share my table … mad, rabid at heart they’ll lap their master’s blood.’ Death cancels all relationship, annuls all status. ‘The dogs go at the grey head and the grey beard/And mutilate the genitals.’ Even a king like Priam, his life’s breath gone, is reduced to unlovely matter, defenceless, disgusting. When Zeus sees Achilles’ immortal horses weeping for Patroclus he apologizes to them for having sent them to live with mortals, whose inevitable destiny is so pitiful, so degrading. ‘There is nothing alive more agonized than man.’

There is one way to salvage something from the brutal fact of death. To the Homeric warriors it seemed that the fearless confrontation of violence with more violence might be a way to transform themselves from destructible things into indestructible memories. A man without courage is mere evanescent matter. ‘You can all turn to earth and water – rot away,’ Menelaus tells the Greeks when none among them is brave enough to take up Hector’s challenge to single combat. But a man ready to go out and meet death cheats it. It is on the battlefield, as Homer tells us over and over again, ‘that men win glory’, and for the ancients the winning of glory had a precise and urgent purpose. ‘Ah my friend,’ says Sarpedon to his comrade, ‘if you and I could escape this fray and live forever, never a trace of age, immortal,/I would never fight on the front lines again/Or command you to the field where men win fame./But now as it is, the fates of death await us/ … and not a man alive/Can flee them or escape – so in we go for the attack!/Give our enemy glory or win it for ourselves.’ Only glory could palliate the grim inexorability of death. The man who attained it distinguished himself in life from the mass of his fellows, and when he died he escaped oblivion.

Achilles’ surpassing beauty is precious not because of any erotic advantage it may give him but because, along with his strength and prowess, it renders him outstanding. His celebrity is profoundly important to him, as it would be to any of his peers. It is not frivolous vanity that makes him prize it so. A man who is praised and honoured while he is alive may be remembered even after his body is reduced to ashes and his spirit has gone down into the dark. To be forgotten is to die utterly. To Agamemnon, facing defeat as the Trojans close on the Greek ships, the most terrible aspect of the fate awaiting him and his army is that, once they have been massacred so far from home, their memory will be ‘blotted out’. The only moment in the Iliad when Achilles shows fear is when the River Xanthus comes close to overpowering him, to sweeping him away ignominiously ‘like some boy, some pig-boy’ and threatens to bury him in slime and silt so deep that his bones will never be found, and no fine burial mound will ensure his lasting fame.

‘Remember,’ says the mysterious wise woman Diotima to Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, ‘that the love of fame and the desire to win a glory that shall never die have the strangest effects on people. For this even more than for their children they are ready to run risks, spend their substance, endure every kind of hardship and sacrifice their lives.’ Achilles, she goes on, would surely not have given his life had he not believed that his ‘courage would live for ever in men’s memory’. Pindar, writing a generation before Plato, rejoiced that in the hero’s lifetime ‘the voice of poets made known … the new excellence of Achilles’, that in his death ‘song did not abandon him’, that the Muses themselves chanted dirges around his pyre, and that the gods ordained that he, or rather his memory, should be tended and sustained by them for ever more.

St Augustine understood the ancients’ craving for fame, and what seemed to him their over-valuation of the ‘windy praise of men’. Looking back from the standpoint of one to whom Christ’s death had offered the hope of heaven, he wrote forgivingly of the folly with which they tried to extend and to give significance to their pathetically finite lives. ‘Since there was no eternal life for them what else were they to love apart from glory, whereby they chose to find even after death a sort of life on the lips of those who sang their praise?’

That windy afterlife could be attained by killing. Hector, challenging Ajax to single combat, promises to return his victim’s body, should he kill him, so that the Greeks can build a burial mound: ‘And some day one will say, one of the men to come,/Steering his oar-swept ship across the wine-dark sea,/“There’s the mound of a man who died in the old days,/One of the brave whom glorious Hector killed”. So they will say, some day, and my fame will never die.’ Better still, it could be achieved by being killed in battle. In the Odyssey Achilles’ shade and that of Agamemnon meet in the Underworld. Agamemnon who, alive, insisted so vehemently on his supremacy, now defers to the other, paying tribute to Achilles’ glorious end. Rank confers honour, but only a soldier’s death brings glory. Murdered on his return to Mycenae by his wife Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, as the victim of a squalid and abhorrent crime, is degraded in perpetuity. He wishes, and Achilles agrees that he is right to do so, that he had been killed at Troy. Enviously, he describes Achilles’ funeral, the eighteen days of unbroken mourning and sombre ceremony, the tears, the dirges, the burnt offerings, the games, the long cortège of men in battle armour, the resounding roar that went up when the pyre was lit, the great tomb built over the hero’s bones. ‘Even in death your name will never die … /Great glory is yours, Achilles,/For all time, in the eyes of all mankind.’

The gods held to their side of the bargain Achilles made. His fame has yet to die. For the Greeks of the classical era, for the Romans after them, and – after a lapse of nearly a thousand years during which the Greek language was all but forgotten in the West – for every educated European gentleman (and a few ladies) from the Renaissance until the beginning of the twentieth century, the two Homeric epics were the acknowledged foundations of Western culture, and ‘the best of the Achaeans’ the prototypical hero. Even now, as this book goes to press, a new film version of the Troy story is being advertised, one in which Brad Pitt, described as Hollywood’s handsomest actor, plays Achilles. It is a role many illustrious men have coveted.

In 334 BC Alexander, the 22-year-old King of Macedonia, already remarkable for his daring and his vast ambition, chose to make his first landfall in Asia on the beach traditionally held to be the one where, some nine centuries earlier, the Greeks’ black ships were drawn up throughout the ten harrowing years that they laid siege to Troy. Alexander slept every night with a copy of the Iliad, which he called his ‘journey-book of excellence in war’, beneath his pillow along with a dagger. He claimed that his mother was descended from Achilles. He encouraged his courtiers to address him by Achilles’ name. As his fleet neared the shore he dressed himself in full armour and took the helm of the royal trireme. Before embarking on his world-subduing campaign, Alexander had come to pay tribute to his model.

At Troy, at this period a mere village, he refused the citizens’ offer of the instrument on which Paris (also known as Alexander) used to serenade Helen. ‘For that lyre,’ he told them, ‘I care little. I have come for the lyre of Achilles, with which, as Homer says, he would sing of the prowess and glories of brave men.’ As Achilles had sung to himself in his tent, evoking the reputation of the heroes dead and gone among whom he wished to be numbered, so Alexander, at this momentous starting-point, solemnly honoured his great forerunner. Stripped naked, and anointed with oil, he ran with his companions to lay a garland on Achilles’ tomb.

That a young Hellenic king ambitious of military conquest in Asia and intent on creating for himself the reputation of a warrior to compare with those of the legendary past should choose Achilles as model and patron is perhaps predictable. But a generation earlier a great man of a very different stamp had also invoked his name. In 399 BC the 70-year-old philosopher Socrates was put on trial in Athens, accused of refusing to recognize the city’s gods, of introducing new deities, and of corrupting the young. He was summoned before a court consisting of five hundred of his peers and invited to make his defence. He proceeded, not to answer the charges against him, but to make a mock both of them and of his chief accusers. Then, midway through his defence (as it was written down by Plato some years after the event), his tone altered. For a while, his famous irony and his provocative sangfroid alike were laid aside. He was unpopular, he said, he realized that, and he had known for some time that he risked incurring a capital charge. But to one who might ask him why, in that case, he persisted in a course that was so evidently irritating to the authorities he said that he would answer: ‘You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action; that is whether he is acting justly or unjustly.’ If he were offered acquittal – and with it his life – on the condition that he would refrain in future from the kind of philosophical enquiry he was accustomed to practise, he would refuse the offer. ‘I am not going to alter my conduct, not even if I have to die a hundred deaths.’

There was an uproar in the court. Unabashed, Socrates reiterated his defiance, alluding to the passage in the Iliad when Thetis tells Achilles that if he re-enters the fighting he will die soon, for he is doomed to fall shortly after Hector. ‘“Let me die forthwith,” said [Achilles], “… rather than remain here by the beaked ships to be mocked, a burden on the ground.” Do you suppose that he gave a thought to death and danger?’ The quotation was inaccurate but the sentiment was authentically Homeric. Achilles, like Socrates after him, refused to be a burden on the earth, a mere lump of animated matter, obedient to the stupid or immoral decrees of others. Wherever he went, Socrates told his judges, established authority would persecute him if he continued to question it, which he would never cease to do. A life in which he was not free to think and speak as he pleased was ‘not worth living’. To die was preferable.

A vote was called. Socrates was found guilty by 280 votes to 220. He spoke again. His accusers demanded the death penalty. According to Athenian law it was for the defendant to propose another, lesser punishment. Socrates believed, and most historians agree with him, that if he had asked for banishment it would have been granted. He disdained to do so. The sentence of death was voted on, and approved by a substantially larger majority than the verdict (indicating that there were more people in court who wanted Socrates dead than there were people who believed him to be guilty as charged). He spoke again, asserting that he was content because the satisfaction of acting rightly, according to one’s own lights of reason and moral discrimination, was so great as to eclipse any suffering: ‘Nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death.’ Defiant, courageous, intransigent, he had proved himself equal to the example he had invoked in court, Achilles.

A man of violence who admitted himself to be easily bested in debate, whose passions were hectic, and whose thought processes were frequently incoherent, who spoke his mind at all times and despised subterfuge, Homer’s Achilles was in many ways a bizarre model for the philosopher who strove unceasingly to subject emotion to reason, who was a master of irony and a brilliant manipulator of men’s minds. But the classical philosopher and the legendary warrior were, for all their differences, soul-mates. Alexander, world-conqueror in the making, sought to associate himself with Achilles’ youthful valour and invincibility, with the glittering, deadly warrior whose brilliance rivalled the splendour of the midday sun. But when Socrates, the impecunious, pug-nosed, incorrigible old worrier of complacent authority and scourge of dishonest thinking, claimed Achilles as a predecessor he did so in appreciation of the fact that Achilles was more than a killer of unparalleled charisma, that he could be taken as a model in peace as well as in war, as one who insisted that his life should be worthy of his own tremendous estimation of his own value as an individual, and who would pay the price required to invest that life with significance and dignity, even if the price were life itself. Socrates defied convention and eventually fell foul of the law because he would submit to no other dictates than those of his intellect and of his private daimon. Achilles rebelled against Agamemnon’s overlordship, and looked on relentless while his countrymen were slaughtered rather than compromise his honour. Both were stubborn, self-destructive, exasperating to their enemies and the dismay of their friends. Both insisted on valuing their own personal integrity higher than any service or disservice they might do the community. Both have been condemned for their culpable pride, and venerated for their courage and their superb defiance.

In his tent at the furthest end of the Greek encampment, sworn to inaction, isolated by his own rage and by others’ fear of it, Achilles set himself at odds with the fractured, fudged-together thing that society necessarily is. Any human group, be it a family, a city, an army or a nation, depends for its continued existence on its members’ willingness to bend and yield, to compromise, to accept what is possible rather than demand what is perfect; but a society that loses sight of the standard of perfection is a dangerously unstable one. From the accommodating to the corrupt is an easy slide. Achilles and others who, like him, have stood firm, however wilfully and self-destructively, on a point of principle, have generally been revered by onlookers and by posterity as wholeheartedly as they have been detested by the authorities they challenge. ‘Become who you are!’ wrote Pindar, Socrates’ contemporary. It is not an easy injunction. For a man to become who he is takes a ruthless lack of concern for others’ interests, monstrous egoism, and absolute integrity. Achilles, who hated a dissembler worse than the gates of death, had the courage to make the attempt, and so died.